I do apologize for lateness and how dialogue-heavy it is. And I just realized the management railing does not extend all the way to the escape pod. Forgive me?

Oh and thanks for all the fantastic reviews!

(&&&)

"Hello? C-come back please!" The core restlessly shuffled on his railing, trying to keep his voice down. He swiveled his optic about, feigning a casual gait. Her eyes watched everywhere and everything, and he didn't appreciate that at all.

"Please? I just need your hel—We need to help each other out of here! Hello?" Another pause. "Hm… Perhaps she only knows Spanish. Ahm, right, give me a sec' here. Uhh… ¿Dónde estás? Necesito saber—No, no…"

A noise attracted his attention, and he watched in dismay as the wall panels hissed to life. Red dots stained his vision, seething with an unearthly heat. He could feel their sultry stares sear him.

A lengthy, weighted pause later: "You lost her, didn't you? Most impressive I must say. How in the android hell did you accomplish such a fantastic feat?"

Wheatley seemed to flutter about like a moth as he struggled to come up with a viable excuse. "D-don't worry, everything is under control—absolutely! Under control. Um, I couldn't move her cryo-chamber so I sent her ahead. By herself. And I was going to go and check with you—well obviously I'm doing that, uh, right now.

"So I—is that okay? I mean, I don't want t—don't want to make any sort of trouble. Hah, imagine! Me making trouble—Actually, though, now that I do imagine that, I don't think it'd be quite pleasant. For me. So if it were possible for me to, you know, not run into any issues, that would be—that would be just golden! If that were t—"

"Are you quite finished yet?" the voice interjected, cutting off the core's rambling. "I sincerely pray you recall what happened the last time you foolishly decided to disobey orders."

"It wasn't my fault!" he desperately cried. "I—the neurotoxin—not my fault! I swear I didn't go anywhere near the bloody button! Just—just general maintenance, that's all. A bit of dust I thought I'd get rid of, nothing else! And—and no one told me that it would, well, fill the facility with deadly gas. I mean no one—"

"Yes yes, make excuses all you want. I'm sure she would adore hearing them in person."

"Please don't kill me! I swear I had absolutely nothing to do with it!"

"Oh we don't do killings. That's not her style. We merely—how shall I say it tastefully?—perform a little operation on you. You were human once, you remember what hospitals are? Embellished cemeteries boasting little cubicles to house the weak. It will just be a liiitle tweak here and there in your coding… And then you'll be quite the obedient little robot slave, won't you?"

The personality core was silent as he processed this, managing only to digest the first half of what was said. "Wait, I… I was once human?"

The panels began to ripple as if in amusement, a crest of seawater billowing before spilling into a smooth, impassive wall. But before taking to the shadows, the voice slipped out one last cryptic thought: "We all were…"

(&&&)

She was curled in a ball, a lost puppy cowering in a corner. She cast her eyes up at the towering construct, her bleach-white hands in fists, her stare carving into the monster's crude optics.

The robot's entire body consisted of clunky bits of steel welded into claw-curved shards of more steel. It clomped about on hard casings of iron, and wires draped from jaws like saliva.

"The lovely Machine Mother will be happy to see you…" it rumbled, clanking forward awkwardly, a broken wind-up toy sent to do its master's bidding.

The girl quickly weighed her options: surrender or flee. Somehow, she imagined taking the former would result in a most unspeakable death and the latter was a similar suicide. So: death or death? She chose the latter.

She eyed the pool of light brimming between the bipedal beast's feet. Her breathing feeling small and pinched, she told herself, Chell, you'll do this. You'll survive. It isn't as if you've never been in such a predicament before is it?

She stood poised, arms tightly pressing bundles of papers to herself, feet planted into the ground. The monstrous thing swung an arm, and she dove, twisting through the air. She bruised her arms in a less-than-graceful landing, her boots slicing against metal. A claw ripped into the shoddy, plastic floor tiles; an enraged bellow following.

She swung her body around, digging her heels into the floor for purchase. The metal beast lurched to face her as she scrambled up. Time was passing briskly, as if the hourglass were being flung to and fro like a ragdoll. She took flight, feet scraping at the ground, the metal thing crashing at her heels, and her heart kept on pumping hard, blood sloshing through bulging veins, struggling to force air into chafed lungs, and—

"Oi, over here!"

She didn't think; she just followed. Obediently.

"That's it, that's it! You're doing it. You've got it—beautifully. Just keep on running—just keep on following my voice!"

Those words of encouragement fueled the fire that forced her feet to get on moving. Chell flew past a myriad of corridors, her eyes scouring the ceiling to follow the whirring orb.

"Alright, alright. Now don't let what I'm saying stop you or anything. Word of advice here: just keep on moving.

"Now, we're gonna get us out of here. Okay? We are. So don't go running amok like last time like some bloody maniac. We'll be going up to the escape lift—should be just a few corridors down, maybe some stairs too, or I dunno, some lifts and—Well the point is, we'll get there soon. Just keep following me and—and do what I say!"

And she trailed after him, a lost puppy now found, because she trusted him. Trust was one of the only things Aperture hadn't yanked from her grasp with its grubby little hands, and she intended to keep it that way. Trust fueled hope, and hope was her key to survival. Without it, she would cave inward, devouring even her own somewhat solid sense of judgment. And betrayal? She could deal with that.

"Here we are. D'you think we've lost him?"

Silence pervaded, punctuated by short gasps for air as the girl crumpled against the railing of the catwalk.

"I expected as much. Are you—are you alright? Wait, never mind. I'm sure you'll be fine." The core glanced down at her curiously, before adding a little roughly, "Get in."

Chell stumbled to her feet, her blurred vision first turning to the prize clutched in her hands. Only a few scrawled sheets of notes remained, many having tumbled from her grasp during her escape. A few more drifted over the catwalks like falling rose petals, skimming softly through the flat air.

A bit dismayed, she trotted into the escape lift, which suspiciously appeared more to be a control station than a lift. The metal core popped off his railing, and Chell promptly scooped him up, throwing him a peculiar stare.

"Now, before you go smashing everything about, look for a switch that says Escape Pod, alright? Simple as tha—Er, don't mean to be rude, but you can read, yeah? I mean, not that I'm questioning your intelligence or anything—Or, not that I'm saying illiteracy is a bad thing!—God no! I—even I run into troubles reading sometimes! Capital 'i' and little 'l' look awful similar sometimes, don't they?

"Anyway, just—Plug me in, actually. I should be able to find it myself. Again—not questioning your intelligence! I'm sure you're very, ah, inteligente."

She complied, feeling a little confused. Her attention promptly shifted to the papers in her arms. They appeared to be notes on transferring the human conscious to the—

"Oh! I think I've got it. This should do it." A few electronic beeps later: "We're moving up. That's… hopeful?"

Indeed they were ascending.

Chell held her head high, colors blazing around her as they passed flicking switches. She felt something rise within her, in sync with her ascent. Streams of air tickled her arms. She closed her eyes and felt as if the air was softly sliding through ruffled feathers.

Suddenly the air fell still, and she lurched where she stood. She carefully cracked open her eyes.

"Power-up completed."

"Oh no, this is not good. This is not good!"

The girl glanced around her, noting the weathered landscape. An open room with dust-green vines spilling from the walls like cataracts and thin rivulets of water slipping underfoot. At the center of the herbologist's nightmare of a room was a winding staircase leading to a deluge of broken steel, which, for some inexplicable reason, was starting to stir.

Chell took in a deep breath, her eyes sliding over the mess of notes in her hands. She ignored the metal core's frantic cries of "Abort!" and "Keep calm!", noting a rather strained "CJ" penned at the bottom of each page. What did those initials stand for?

September 21

He's done it. That delusional man has finally named me his successor. Can you imagine? He's handing me the keys to one of the most prosperous and powerful science facilities in the country—no, the world!—and he doesn't even suspect what he's done.

Poor monster. But I suppose he is ill. His mental health is deteriorating far quicker than I had planned. I guess I was too liberal with the "special powder". I only hope he survives his operation…

—CJ

The churning of machinery caused her to glance up from her reading and freeze at what she saw. What initially appeared as a junkyard of metal parts now gnashed itself into a collective mash of robotic pieces. The metallic whine of the thing disturbed and chilled her to the very bone. She pitched a nervous look at her companion.

"She's gonna kill us! She's gonna kill us!" he kept saying. "No no, keep calm! I'll, uh, distract her!

"Oi, you ugly monster! Tell us how to get us out of here, and—and no one will get hurt!"

But the robot's attention only had time to spare for Chell.

"Oh, it's you. Come to gloat? Because I don't see what's so great about having enough blubber to make an elephant seal jealous.

"…Did I just insult you? I'm sorry. I just thought you'd respond to it more than if I attempted to engage in regular conversation with you like regular people. But don't mind me. You did kill me, so I guess you wouldn't care anyway."

The human girl stood on the "lift", a little surprised, a little stung. A little wary too; she remembered who this robot was, and she didn't like it.

"…And we'd love it—seriously—if you ah—if you'd just point our way out and—Wait, you did what?"

"Well, it's been a long time. And since you're here, we might as well get back to testing. Why don't you say something to your friend there?"

A brief pause as the core managed to recover to remark brightly, "Oh, and—where are my manners? Never introduced myself. And you never said a thing! Anyway, the name's Wheatley, and I'm happy to make your acquaint—"

His speech spluttered as a mechanical arm screeched to being, reached, and pinched the life out of the poor core. His chatter ceased, the baleful ambience wrenched more sinister sounds from the area.

"Now that we've got that out of your system, I'm afraid we don't need him anymore. But don't waste your tears on worthless matters, we have testing to do."

The mechanical extension tossed the crumpled core away and reached to snatch Chell up. She tensed, fearing the worst. But the arm did nothing more than whir away merrily and extend over the incinerator. It opened its jaws.

"And you are going to comply. For science."

And she was falling, falling, falling… An innocent scrap of leaf slipping into hell itself.

(&&&)

I need to learn something called subtlety. Anyway, please do review!

Oh, and further apologies if this seems confusing. This is a 'bridge' chapter connecting the introduction to where the plot starts to pick up, so hopefully the next chapter will have better quality. Hardest part is writing with a developed plot in mind: you start assuming everyone else knows it...